Chief Justice for Administration and Management Robert A. Mulligan today announced that the Trial Court has completed its rollout of MassCOURTS Lite to 63 divisions of the District and Boston Municipal Court Departments. MassCOURTS is the Trial Court’s web-based, electronic case management system. MassCOURTS Lite is the core of the system’s criminal case management component, which improves public safety through better information sharing and identity of defendants in criminal cases and provides many cost efficiencies in court operations.

           The rollout was accomplished in approximately one year with the support and assistance of hundreds of Trial Court employees across the Commonwealth who attended to their regular case management responsibilities as they were adapting to the new system.

          Chief Justice Mulligan said, “I am very proud of the effort and hard work of those employees in the trenches and their enthusiastic participation in the training in order to make the rollout a success. Most remarkable is their willingness to embrace cultural change and to modify entrenched business practices to improve management through automation. Through the capable leadership of Chief Information Officer Craig Burlingame and Judge Jim McHugh, who has devoted countless hours to this project as my special adviser, the Trial Court has made substantial progress in the rollout of MassCOURTS.”

           During the past year, an average of one court division per week was added to the MassCOURTS Lite system. The system contains more than 2.4 million criminal cases, 129,000 of which have been added since the rollout began. More than 5.5 million identities of defendants, including their aliases, are in the system. Approximately 550 Trial Court employees use MassCOURTS Lite to perform nearly 20,000 transactions daily.

           An important public safety feature of MassCOURTS Lite is the integration of State Police data which provides better identity management in criminal cases. Each night, the MassCOURTS Lite system automatically obtains State Identification (SID) numbers assigned by the State Police to individuals who have been arrested and fingerprinted. Each time it successfully matches a SID number with MassCOURTS data, MassCOURTS automatically adds the SID number to the system's identity information, greatly enhancing the reliability and the accuracy of information Trial Court employees can use in future cases. Hundreds of Trial Court employees from the clerks' and probation offices are collaborating in a fundamentally new way to enhance defendant tracking.

           Chief A.Wayne Sampson, retired Executive Director of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association said, "The Trial Court has been in regular communication with the association and with our individual members to insure a smooth transition to the new system, and to implement never before used standards for criminal identity management within the Trial Court. We appreciate the collaborative way this initiative has been approached and look forward to the continued public safety benefits this new application represents."

           Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis said, "The Boston Police Department applauds the efforts of the Trial Court to incorporate biometric support to identity data in criminal cases within MassCOURTS... We look forward to working with the courts as these efforts continue and welcome the resulting improvements to the entire criminal justice system."

           The new system eliminates the labor and cost of mailing thousands of printed notices by electronically delivering information about appointment of counsel in criminal cases to the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS).

           CPCS Chief Counsel William J. Leahy said, "The breakthrough that has been accomplished this year is impressive, and we applaud the MassCOURTS team for its accomplishment."

           Other cost saving features of MassCourts Lite include the creation of centralized forms which are automatically filled in with case information and instantly delivered over the computerized network to printers in the location where the form is needed.

           District Court Chief Justice Lynda M. Connolly and Boston Municipal Court Chief Justice Charles R. Johnson said that MassCOURTS Lite helps them to achieve goals derived from the recommendations of the Monan Report that are aimed at reducing the time litigation takes and the public and private cost litigation entails.

           Chief Justice Connolly said, "The MassCOURTS Lite application allows managers to 'drill down' into the data to identify potential improvements in both case flow and case processing. For the first time we have access to important information to help us fashion streamlined procedures to close out cases or to schedule next events."

           Chief Justice Johnson said, "The new web-based case management system enables information sharing throughout the Trial Court and its constituent agencies, and improves information flow within the court system itself."

           At the same time that MassCOURTS Lite was being rolled out in the District and Boston Municipal Court Departments, the electronic document imaging component of the MassCOURTS system was being installed in the Probate and Family Court where it is now in use in every division. Today those courts have electronic images of more than 113,000 cases and 912,000 electronic documents. Approximately 5,000 new documents are added daily. The imaging system allows instant access to documents, even if they are physically stored in remote locations.

           In 2005, the Land Court Department was the first Trial Court department to "go live" with the full web-based MassCOURTS system. The rollout of full MassCOURTS is now moving forward with the other Trial Court Departments and is expected to be completed next year.